"On March 17, 2003, for example, VDare.com prominently posted on its homepage an anonymous letter celebrating [evolutionary psychologist Kevin] MacDonald's work and quoting his allegation that the Iraq war "is being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media."

In other words, deep down for Frum, it's all about his ethnocentric fixations.

While Frum is an admirably clear thinker on questions that don't engage his emotions, he is all too frequently disabled by his ethnocentric obsessions.

Frum put us on his little blacklist of "Unpatriotic Conservatives" in part because:

"More generally, MacDonald said — and VDare.com repeated — 'the most important Jewish contributions to culture were facilitated not only by high IQ but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters.'"

Frum's ethnocentric preoccupations can take on bizarre forms. Last year, for instance, Frum was invited to give a d'var Torah at a synagogue to commemorate his 18th wedding anniversary. His sermon started off as a sweet tribute to his wife, writer Danielle Crittenden, but then veered off into the neocon fever swamps in a manner you have to see to believe.

In 2004 on NRO, he unintentionally demonstrated the neocon worldview in a nutshell while writing about his " friend Dean Godson, for many years the chief editorial writer of Britain's Daily Telegraph."

Frum wrote

"His father was an American Jew born in Russia, so you might have expected him to concentrate his attention on the Arab-Israeli dispute. Instead, for no reason that any outsider could easily discern, Dean became profoundly concerned with the Irish quarrel—and passionately committed to the lonely struggle of what may qualify as the world's least popular political constituency, the predominantly Protestant Unionists of northern Ireland." [ Irish Lesson David Frum’s Diary, National Review Online, June 21, 2004]

Think about that for a minute.

Frum says nobody could understand why the editorial writer of the leading Conservative newspaper in the United Kingdom chose to concentrate his attention on the guerilla war going on within the United Kingdom rather than on the problems of a distant land from which some of his ancestors had migrated a couple of thousand years ago!

Furthermore, it's hardly bizarre for the chief Tory editorialist to support loyalists in Northern Ireland who wish to remain subjects of the Queen. It would be far stranger if the Telegraph's editorial voice didn't mind the prospect of the dismemberment of his country.

Yet Frum just didn't get it.

This helps explain why the neocons were so surprised that many ordinary young Iraqi guys were steamed that foreigners were occupying their country: the kind of blood-and-soil patriotism that the great majority of humans feel is relatively foreign to them, since the focus of so much of their national enthusiasm is directed toward another country overseas. Further, the neocons couldn't identify with occupied people enough to understand how the Iraqis would feel because the neocons so totally identify with the occupiers of the West Bank.

In contrast, the great majority of American Jews are as patriotically focused upon America's welfare as Godson is upon the UK's. The obsessives like Frum form only a small coterie—but one with influence disproportionate to their insight.

In his Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington (assisted by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay) explained with prophetic clarity the dangers of the neoconservatism that inspired Frum's crusade to silence "Unpatriotic Conservatives":

"Sympathy for the favorite [foreign] nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification... Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake … Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."